a Raycast alternative that lives in the menu bar

where Raycast is better, and it is not close

starting here because the rest of the page is not worth reading otherwise. Raycast is built around one gesture — press a hotkey, start typing, the right thing happens — and everything below is downstream of that gesture being good.

hop has no equivalent of that gesture and does not want one — what it puts in the same place is a grid of the apps you actually open: the app launcher module

the extension store

this is the part nothing here touches. issue trackers, password managers, translators, cloud consoles, whatever your team runs on — someone has written an extension for it, and it answers to the same search field as everything else. hop has eighteen fixed tools and no store. that is not a smaller store, it is a different shape of product.

commands and workflows

chaining steps, scripts you wrote yourself, one keyword that does four things in order. if any part of your day is «I do this same sequence every morning», that is what Raycast is for, and a panel of buttons is not a substitute for it.

speed from the keyboard

a search field is fast when you already know the name of what you want. two letters and a return beat any amount of pointing. people who work that way do not describe it as a preference — they describe having to use a mouse as friction, and they are not wrong.

sync, teams and the paid tiers

AI in the paid tiers, sync between machines, shared setups for a team. free covers a great deal; Pro is $10 a month, or $96 a year, checked at the source on 10 september 2026. none of that exists here and none of it is planned.

if search-driven work is how you think, close this page. nothing below replaces it.

what macOS 26 took off Raycast's plate

this is the part the alternative listicles have not caught up with. two of the things people installed Raycast for are now in the system, free, with no app at all — and it is worth ten seconds to check whether that covers you before comparing anything.

that release moved a lot of ground under small Mac utilities at once, not just these two: what macOS 26 changed for menu bar apps

clipboard history is in Spotlight now

press ⌘Space for Spotlight, then ⌘4. what you copied recently is listed there, searchable, and one click puts it back on the clipboard. it is not on until you allow it — the first time you look, macOS shows a consent sheet about personal information appearing in results.

where it stops is depth. the switch lives in System Settings → Spotlight, in a section called «Results from Clipboard», and the line under it reads «Clipboard history is available in Spotlight» with a value of 8 hours. checked on macOS 26.6.2 on 10 september 2026. so it is a window measured in time: a quiet afternoon uses it up the same as a busy one.

Apple documents the shortcut and the Clear History button: search your Clipboard history in Spotlight — Apple Support

turning it on, moving the shortcut if ⌘4 is taken, and working out why something you copied is not in there is a procedure of its own: find something you copied earlier

and so is browsing your apps

Spotlight in macOS 26 has four numbered areas next to the search field: ⌘1 applications, ⌘2 files, ⌘3 actions, ⌘4 clipboard. ⌘1 is an app browser — categorised, arrow keys, no typing required. it is not a launcher in the Raycast sense and there are no extensions behind it, but «show me my apps» is answered.

the numbered areas are in the Spotlight documentation: narrow your search results in Spotlight — Apple Support

Launchpad went away in macOS 26 and this is what replaced it: open your apps without Launchpad

so do you still need Raycast

the short version, before the details. if you open Raycast for commands, extensions and sequences you built yourself, yes — keep it, and nothing on this page is aimed at you.

if you open it four times a day for the clipboard and for putting two windows side by side, the simple case now ends somewhere else. it ends when the thing you copied is older than the window Spotlight keeps, when you want three windows rather than two, and when you find yourself typing the name of something you would rather just look at.

where hop overlaps with Raycast

clipboard history, window management and text recognition exist in both. in hop they sit in a panel behind one menu bar icon, alongside fifteen others — you point at them rather than typing their names.

we have not put Raycast through a feature-by-feature test, and will not describe gaps we have not seen. the middle column is the system, checked on macOS 26.6.2; the right column is hop. neither is a verdict on the other product.

the built-in tiling menu, for the thirds row: window tiling icons and keyboard shortcuts — Apple Support

what the clipboard module keeps, and what it refuses to keep: clipboard history

the eighteen zones and the hotkeys behind them: the window manager

why a menu bar icon rather than a search field

a search field is fast when you know what you want. it is slower when you want to look at something — a temperature, a download in progress, a colour you picked ten minutes ago. those are glance-and-point tasks, not type-a-name tasks.

that is the whole reason this lives where it lives, and it is also why it is not a launcher: launching an app is exactly the type-a-name case, and Spotlight already has it.

the one that turns out to be neither — you frame a region and read what is in it: text recognition

how to try it without deciding anything

1. turn on the Spotlight clipboard first — ⌘Space, ⌘4, allow it — and give it a week on its own
2. keep Raycast: the two do not conflict, and one of them is a launcher
3. download hop, about 6 mb, no account, macOS 14 or later
4. for that week, reach for the menu bar icon instead of the hotkey when the task is to look at something rather than name it
5. after that you will know which of the three your hand goes to, and for what

frequently asked questions

does hop replace Raycast?

no. Raycast is a launcher and hop is not. it covers some of the same small tools — clipboard, windows, recognition — behind a menu bar icon instead.

do i still need Raycast on macOS 26?

depends what you open it for. clipboard history and browsing your apps are in Spotlight now, so if those were the reasons, probably not. for extensions, commands and sequences you built yourself, nothing in the system comes close.

is Raycast free?

yes, the free tier covers a great deal. Pro is $10 a month or $96 a year, checked at the source on 10 september 2026, and it is where AI and sync live.

can i run both?

yes, they do not conflict. plenty of reasons to: one for launching and commands, one for the tools you look at rather than type.

does hop have extensions?

no. eighteen fixed tools, and you switch off the ones you do not want. there is no store and nothing to install into it.

is there a Pro tier?

no. hop is free and open source under MIT, with no paid tier planned and no AI features to sell.

how far back does the clipboard history go?

in hop, the last 100 entries, or up to 300 if you raise it — it counts entries rather than hours. the Spotlight one is a time window instead, shown as 8 hours in System Settings → Spotlight.

the hop side of this

clipboard history — everything you copied — text, links, screenshots and whole files.